what is the difference between first order and second order beliefs (in developmental psych)?

Answer 1

First Order Beliefs and Higher Order Intentions: Wanting To and Wanting That:

Children's understanding of a first order false belief was compared with their understanding of a third order embedding of mental states, defined as "an intention about a false belief about an intention." Subjects were 72 Canadian middle-class children who were 3, 4, or 5 years of age. Materials were playfigures of a mother, little boy, girl, friend, and a toy playhouse. Each subject was presented with four scenarios involving the playfigures in the playhouse. Two scenarios assessed understanding of a higher order belief and two assessed understanding of a first order belief. Findings indicated that tasks that involved a third order embedding of mental states were no more difficult for preschoolers to understand than were tasks involving the false belief alone. Findings also supported the notion that intentions and beliefs do not pose the same representational problems. While a false belief must be construed as a representation, an intention may be interpreted simply as a link between a person and an object. It is concluded that an analysis in terms of the number of levels of mental states seems to be simplistic.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED334006&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED334006

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/concepts/concepts.html

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=145448.146751

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=22651

Second-order beliefs about intention and children’s attributions of sociomoral judgment:

Predicting how another person will evaluate the intention underlying an action involves consideration of second-order mental states. Children (ages 5–10 years) and college students (N = 105) predicted an observer’s belief about an actor’s intention and evaluated the actor from both their own perspectives and the perspective of the observer. Younger children were more likely than older children and adults to attribute a belief to the observer that mismatched the actor’s prior intention. Attributed beliefs about intention were more likely to match negative prior intentions than to match positive prior intentions and were also more likely to match prior intentions when the observer knew the actor’s prior intention than when the observer did not know the actor’s prior intention. The judgments attributed to the observer were based on the beliefs about intention attributed to the observer, showing use of second-order mental states to infer another’s sociomoral judgments.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WJ9-4N3H170-1&_user=10&_coverDate=05%2F31%2F2007&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=656cd2053125a78e9889843634884a00